These videos deliver how to demonstrations in a variety of NetBackup functions.

They assume fundamental NetBackup knowledge.

If you need basic NetBackup training, please go to http://education.symantec.com where you will be able to find a listing of instructor-led classroom training as well as self-paced computer-based courses for NetBackup.

This video is Performing Granular Restores on Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 using NetBackup 6.5 and 7.0

For this demonstration, we will be using a master/media server running NetBackup 7.0.1 on Windows 2003 R2 SP2. The client is running Exchange 2007 client running NetBackup 7.0.1 on Windows 2008 R2. It is clustered and configured for CCR. We will also be using an Exchange 2007 user account, accessed via Outlook Web Access using Internet Explorer on the master/media server.

Although we will be restoring to an Exchange 2007 server using NetBackup 7.0.1 for this demonstration, the interface and configuration settings are the same for NetBackup 6.5, so the information presented here can be applied to a NetBackup 6.5 environment, as well as a restore for Exchange 2003.

This demonstration requires that the Exchange GRT backup already be configured. The configuration that was done when setting up the Exchange GRT backup will provide all of the needed components for an Exchange GRT restore.

This video does not apply to:

Exchange 2010

Non-GRT Backups

NetBackup versions prior to 6.5

We will start with the Exchange 2007 e-mail account. Here in Outlook Web Access we can see the user has two contacts. We will delete one of those contacts now.

Now we will bring up the Backup, Archive, Restore (or BAR) GUI. We start by going to the File menu and click on Specify NetBackup Machines and Policy Type. In the resulting window, we set the source and the destination to be the Exchange 2007 cluster virtual host name. We also set the policy type to "MS-Exchange-Server" and then click OK.

Next, we click on the 'Select for Restore' button. Initially, we see the backup images in a Timeline view which does not give much information about each backup. It is recommended to go to the View menu and deselect the Show NetBackup History as a Timeline setting as we are doing here to get more information about each backup, including the specific time backed up. Then select the specific backup you want to restore from.

Next, in the 'All Folders' pane in the BAR GUI, we drill into the Information Store, then the Storage Group, then the database. As we drill down further into the database to expand the user mailbox we want to restore an item for, we see a pause while the mailbox information is extracted from the Exchange database. The GRT process accesses the Exchange database directly from the backup image via an NFS mount. The process to enumerate the mailbox information can take a few minutes, and will also cause restore jobs to appear in the Activity Monitor of the NetBackup administration console. There restore jobs are there to indicate that the GRT process is working correctly. Once we drill down into the user's contacts, we select the contact that we had previously deleted.

With the mailbox item selected for restore, we click on the second icon down on the left-hand toolbar, which is 'Start Restore of Marked Files. This brings up the Restore Marked Files dialog. We see under the Microsoft Exchange tab, options to choose whether or not we will overwrite existing messages. We will leave the default option Do not restore the message selected. Since we are restoring back to the original mailbox we do not need to change any settings under the General tab, so we will click the Start Restore button. A message will appear indicating the restore has successfully initiated. We click Yes to see the 'View Status' window.

In the Activity Monitor of the NetBackup admin console, we see the restore job has started. In the View Status window we see the job completed successfully. It does indicate that it kept existing files, and restored 3 of 5 files successfully. This is due to the already existing folders in the mailbox, and should be considered normal behavior.

Looking in Activity Monitor, we also see the job with a blue man and status 0. On a restore, any final status other than 0 should be considered an unsuccessful restore and the cause should be investigated and the restore retried.

We go back to the user mailbox in Outlook Web Access, and we can see the contact item we had previously deleted has now returned.